I spent my PhD asking people why they stay up late

There's something about the hour before bed that's kind of magical and not like a hocus pocus or wingardium leviosa kind of magic. Although I do wish there was a spell that could lift me from the couch and into bed at the end of a day. It's the kind of magic where it's quiet, it's silent, there's nothing that's going to bother you. You can go down a YouTube rabbit hole or just sit in the dark after your kids have gone to bed. This vibe summarizes one of the most unexpected findings from all of my research. I studied bedtime procrastination as part of my PhD for 5 years. And after taking some time to reflect, I believe that this hour before bed is strangely special and must be protected. For me to reach this conclusion, I ran a clinical trial that partially didn't work. The results were unexpected. And along the way of doing all of this work, I learned to value me time differently and to feel less guilty about my own bedtime behaviors. So, here's how I got here. I'm very excited to say that I've developed a quiz where you can find out your bedtime procrastination type. And also, I'm running a master class on bedtime procrastination next week. There's more on all of this at the end of the video.

If you haven't heard this term bedtime procrastination before, it's when you go to bed at later than intended and not because anything else got in the way, just because you wanted to. Maybe it was a choice. There's the academic definition in my thesis, broadly defined as the valitional delay of going to bed without any external circumstances causing the delay, such as children, pets, or being on call for work. As we discover in the later pages of this work, the most common type of bedtime procrastination is using your devices. You are on the internet. You're watching YouTube videos. Maybe you're scrolling. Maybe it's doom scrolling is all scrolling. Doom scrolling. You're on Tik Tok, Instagram, Reddit, Wikipedia. Perhaps you're gaming, whatever it may be. And this is what my research focuses on in academia. What we call pre-sleep electronic device use. There's like 10 different terms that all describe this same thing. And it's basically why do smart sleepaware people know that sleep is good for them and know that they should go to bed but they just don't.

Now I ran a clinical trial for people who wanted to use their phone less in the evening. It was designed with heavy input from these people. It was a 3-week program that we called rest O. Rest O stands for reducing evening screen time online. It was a randomized trial that was a pilot trial because the numbers were a little bit smaller than a full clinical trial. And we recruited 55 new career starters. So, they're people who were transitioning from university or full-time study, maybe at a technical school or wherever, into full-time employment. So, they were just joining the workforce. A great time to change behavior and try to form new habits. These people were recruited from all over the world. A lot of them actually were recruited via this YouTube channel. So, hi. And they had one common goal, which was they were trying to reduce their bedtime procrastination, but specifically the time that they were spending on screens before they went to bed when they knew they should probably be sleeping. It was late. Now, all of these people weren't doing the same thing. They were randomized into three different groups. And to give you a great visual of what these three different groups were, I have made a poster. The poster is really large. I think it's better if the poster is an image on the screen. The first group in the trial was an active control. They were still part of the program, but they use some techniques that research have shown are not really effective in changing your behavior because they're based on willpower and self-control. So, in this case, it was setting a goal. So, we had all of the participants in the control group set a goal around just when they would stop using their devices in their evening. The second group was a substitute group. We used this technique called behavioral substitution where we just had them pick another behavior, another activity, something that they really liked doing that they would substitute in to that time that they were normally doom scrolling. And then the third group where things get really interesting. So the third group was called prevent. And we had this idea that we wanted to explore with the prevent group. So in one of our previous studies, people had told us how important bedtime procrastination was to them, right? In different ways. So they needed me time. People just wanted me time to be able to explore their interests, to explore their identity, to have a sense of autonomy where somebody else had control over their whole day, whether that was an employer or they were a caregiver to a parent or a child or they were just really busy and they just didn't have time to themselves. So, we knew that me time was important. So, we had this idea. What if we got people to carve out space for me time during the day? So, what if you needed, say, to watch 30 minutes of YouTube a day. You normally do that at night and then things autoplay and then you lose track of time and all of a sudden it's been 2 hours and you're losing sleep, which is, you know, bad for your health. I think we're all at this point where we know the benefits of sleep. But what if you watch that 30 minutes of YouTube when you were commuting? Maybe you're on the bus or you're on the train to work. What if you watched it during your lunch break? while you were eating dinner? You ate dinner by yourself? What if you watched it as soon as you got home from work? So then by the time it was the evening, you'd kind of done your video watching for the day and you could read a book or you could do something else that could help you wind down. So the prevent group had one mission. Do something enjoyable during the day so you don't have that need to do it at midnight. You're kind of frontloading the fun in your day. So you don't need to have this fun magical time in the evening. Can we have a magical lunch? Is that possible? If you meet that need during the day, the need should go away. Right now, the whole team who was working on this study thought that this was a really cool idea. It was really novel. It was exploratory. We could just kind of do it and see what happened. It's really cool when you have the opportunity to do research like that. I want you just to take a moment to think about why that might not work. Take a minute, drop it in the comments. So, could we prevent bedtime procrastination and this momentum that people get from starting to do one thing like watching a video into delaying their bedtime by 2 or 3 hours? Could we prevent that by finding a space for me time at other points in people's day? The answer is no. The prevent group largely couldn't do it. And when we asked them why, like what happened? The response that they gave us, even though we had sat down to find a time in their day that they could carve out for this, they said to us, "My day isn't mine to control. " And here are some quotes. It would be interruptive at other times of the day. I'm a truck driver, so I don't always get breaks for me time anytime I want to. Because researchers have to be inherently self-promotional to be able to get your papers published in peer-reviewed journals and stuff like that. I do want to say that the prevent group did experience benefits to their sleep. They did reduce their pre-le device use by about 29 minutes on average, which is a 45% decrease. That's like a lot. And when we followed up with them, they were sleeping 50 minutes more than they were at baseline. So, here's the thing that really got me with these results. If they couldn't find me time during the day, but still all of their metrics and everything improved, what happened? So, as part of this trial, we did coaching. And it was this kind of habits coaching. It was personalized. And the thing about a habit is that you often don't realize what some of your actions are or what some of the triggers for your behaviors are that can get you in this procrastination spiral. So what we did is we sat down with people and we went through the evening routines, went through their behavior, and we asked all of these specific prompts and questions to find out what something was that somebody could do instead of their doom scrolling or the behavior that they didn't want to do. And through this, we identified these behaviors that people could use as me time that with the prevent group they were going to do at different times of the day. And what the prevent group did was they took that specific behavior that we had identified and they just did it in an hour before bed. So they basically just shifted their behavior to be the same as the other arm in the trial where people were doing this thing that was good for them and would help them wind down but just before they went to bed. So it's just this really weird thing as a researcher where the participants didn't do what we had imagined they would do. It was completely unexpected, but it still worked. But only because there was this natural inclination for people to just want to do whatever the thing was they were doing. Maybe they were doing some stretching or yoga. Maybe they were listening to music or a podcast or reading a book. Like whatever the relaxing activity was that we had identified would be repeatable for them and that they wanted to do like they were motivated to do that, they were just doing it immediately before they went to bed. So they essentially just took the skills that we gave them and just applied it to a windown routine instead of trying to prevent bedtime procrastination. But the thing that kept nagging at me was why did all of these different people who were not in communication with each other all naturally drift back to doing this specific thing that we had equipped them

with and coached them through in the 1 hour before bed. And this question sent me back to a study that I did a few years earlier about why people actually procrastinate their bedtime. Now, when we ran this study, not a lot of other researchers had actually sat down and asked people, "Hey, why do you procrastinate your bedtime? " And in the research and all of the literature, a lot of people assumed that bedtime procrastination is bad. And I just want to clarify that it certainly can be. I think at this point, we can all agree sleep is good for us. We know we need to sleep. We know consistent sleep is good, but it's hard. And people said things like, "I always feel I'll find myself almost like getting angry but almost frustrated. Like, oh, I give so much time to this company all day and then like I want my own time to do my own thing. " Or I already lose my whole day and I want to basically do something for myself. I want to actually have a little bit of my own time for me and I try to prolong it as much as possible. I wouldn't have this secret little fun, guilt-free activity to make me feel like I'm living a fulfilling life. And what it made me realize is that the reasons why a lot of people are procrastinating their bedtime are almost like a psychological need. So there are these three basic psychological needs that people have feeling connected, feeling capable and feeling in control. This is from self-determination theory which is a framework for how to think about psychological needs. And feeling in control is also called autonomy in that framework. And if you don't have autonomy during the day, that is a basic need that you can then reclaim in the evening. And even though we had this prevent condition in the newer clinical trial that we were trying to figure out ways that they could reclaim autonomy during their day, it kind of didn't work. And I guess when you dig down into it, if you're trying to reclaim time and be autonomous during a scheduled break, if that's your commute or your lunch break or something like that, it's not really a free period. It's like a period of time that someone else like your employer most likely has just given you. And so in some ways it maybe it doesn't feel like it's your own like it does when it's 11:30 at night and it's really just your own time. And I really do think that's why the prevent group kept drifting back. It wasn't that those activities weren't enjoyable to do during the day. It was just that they were doing them in a time that someone else had given them and they weren't reclaiming that time to be truly theirs. And that's why this hour before bed is magical because it's unclaimed because it's yours by default because it's silent because nobody can schedule something during that time and no one has given you that time. You're taking it for yourself. And yes, it did take me 5 years of research to reach this conclusion when I'm sure a lot of you knew this 10 years ago or 20 years ago or whatever. But I think it's really important that we do the research because what a lot of the solutions are proposed for bedtime procrastination are time management solutions and they're not going to work because it's not a time management problem. You can't just schedule your way out of a need a psychological need for autonomy, right? You can't just set a goal to stop using your phone at 10:00 when you have this need for me time. It's not about the clock at all. And this really brings us to this point of so where do we go from here? What do we actually do about this? And first, if you are a bedtime procrastinator, I want you to actually stop treating the hour before bed like it's your enemy. Like you shouldn't be doing it. Because if you have a consistent sleep schedule and if you are getting roughly the sleep that you need, there is nothing wrong with having this 30 minute period or having this 1 hour period for me time before you go to sleep. I do know that this transition between device use and me time and then actually going to bed and going to sleep consistently is one of the biggest pain points for people and that is a lot harder to actually fix and we can get to that. It is completely legitimate to want to have some time to yourself and to need that's okay. And what I've learned through all of my research and all of my time on the internet is that people really have an appetite for information about bedtime procrastination. They're curious about it. They want to know more strategies to help them if it is bleeding into your sleep window and it's leading to sleep debt if that is happening to you. And I just want you to all know I've been thinking about this for a long time and I'm here for it. This is the part where I finally get to

say I'm running a master class about bedtime procrastination and I'm really excited about it. I also made some freebies including a quiz that you can take if you want to find out what type of bedtime procrastinator you are. And all of these have including the quiz design have been informed by my research. Okay, first so a week from today will be my master class on bedtime procrastination. It's a 60-minute deep dive into everything that you need to know about bedtime procrastination, way more detail than regular YouTube videos. And there'll be a 30-minute Q& A after where you can ask me anything that you need to know about bedtime procrastination. This will also be available as a recording that you can watch anytime, any place, any year that you happen to be watching this video. If a lot of time has passed, there's the recording. And if you're kind of interested, but the master class is too much detail, I've also developed this sleep habits guide that's designed to help you figure out what your sleep habits actually are and give you some information on them and some guidance if you think you do want to change your behavior. On the other end of the spectrum, if you're like, I want everything. I need everything, I'm also offering a limited number of sleep routine audits where you spend 50 minutes with me one-on-one building a personalized windown routine that works for you and is supported by the research and it's based on the methods that I used in these studies. There's a link to all of these in the description. I guess this is a launch video for all of these things that I've been working on, but I'm just not a natural marketer. And I couldn't figure out a way to capture emails with the quiz that wasn't annoying. Like, give me your email so you can see the results. Gross. So, I've actually designed the world's worst salesunnel where I'm not capturing emails for people who do the quiz. So, I just wanted to say like if you do the quiz, I put a lot of time into all of this stuff. Maybe you could just sign up for my email list separately and I will email you so infrequently you'll probably forget that you're on the email list. So there's a link for you to do that. Maybe just as like a thank you for doing the quiz. If you find the quiz interesting, maybe you could sign up for my email list. Thank you. If you were still watching this video, that's really cool. It's been a long time you're still here with me. I appreciate you. I hope you have a really good night's